Is Sports Betting Legal in Arizona? Yes, at a 10% Tax (2026)

✓ Last verified: 2026-08-01

Yes. Sports betting is legal in Arizona, online and in person, for anyone 21 or older. Mobile apps and retail sportsbooks both went live on September 9, 2021, deliberately timed to the opening night of the NFL season, and today a dozen apps compete under the Arizona Department of Gaming.

Two things make Arizona distinctive. Its licenses are split evenly between Native American tribes and professional sports teams rather than tied to casinos, and its tax is one of the lowest in the country. It is also, as of 2026, the first state in the nation to file criminal charges against a prediction market. If you are physically in Arizona and 21+, you can bet in minutes. Here is what actually matters.

Quick facts

	Arizona status (July 2026)
Online (mobile) betting since	✅ Legal since September 9, 2021
Retail sportsbooks since	✅ Legal (same-day launch)
Minimum age	21+
Tax rate	10% online, 8% retail
Live sportsbook apps	12 (per the state regulator)
License model	20-license cap: up to 10 tribal + 10 pro-sports
College team betting	✅ Allowed, including ASU and Arizona
College player props	❌ Banned statewide
Prediction markets (Kalshi)	⚠️ Charged criminally, then blocked by a federal judge
Regulator	Arizona Department of Gaming (ADG)

How Arizona got here

Arizona legalized sports betting through House Bill 2772 (HB 2772), which Governor Doug Ducey signed on April 15, 2021. The law authorized “event wagering” (the statute’s term for sports betting) plus daily fantasy sports, and it rode alongside an amended Tribal-State Gaming Compact negotiated with Arizona’s tribes.

The launch was fast. Under five months after signing, betting went live on September 9, 2021, the opening night of the 2021 NFL season. Both online apps and the first retail sportsbook opened that same day, with FanDuel taking Arizona’s first in-person bets at the Phoenix Suns’ downtown arena, now Footprint Center. That put Arizona among the earliest wave of post-PASPA states to launch with a full slate of national operators on day one. The Arizona Department of Gaming (ADG) writes the rules and regulates the market.

The 10-tribe, 10-team license model

Arizona’s licensing structure is its signature feature. Under A.R.S. 5-1304, the state caps online “event wagering operator” licenses at 20, and it splits them: up to 10 for Indian tribes and up to 10 for non-tribal, professional-sports applicants. The market is not built around casinos, the way most states do it. It is built around who controls Arizona sports.

The non-tribal pool is unusually broad. It covers owners of an Arizona professional sports franchise, but also the operator of a golf facility that hosts an annual PGA Tour event (TPC Scottsdale, home of the WM Phoenix Open) and the promoter of a NASCAR national-touring race in the state (Phoenix Raceway). Each license holder then partners with a sportsbook brand, its “designee,” to actually run the app. That is why the ADG’s operator list reads like a map of Arizona sports: FanDuel with the Phoenix Suns, BetMGM with the Arizona Cardinals, Caesars with the Arizona Diamondbacks, DraftKings with TPC Scottsdale, theScore Bet with Phoenix Raceway, and BetRivers with the Arizona Rattlers, alongside tribal licensees like bet365 (Ak-Chin), Desert Diamond (Tohono O’odham), Fanatics (Tonto Apache), Hard Rock (Navajo Nation), betcris (San Carlos Apache), and Bally Bet (Phoenix Mercury).

The 20 is a ceiling, not a quota. The 20 is a ceiling, not a quota that has been filled. Fourteen licenses have been issued, split seven tribal and seven franchise, so slots remain open on both sides, which is why the state periodically reopens applications.

The tax

Arizona taxes online betting at 10% of adjusted gross revenue and retail at 8%. That online rate is among the five lowest in the country. For scale, New York taxes the same activity at 51% and Pennsylvania at 36%, so Arizona operators keep far more of every dollar and can run more aggressive promotions.

There is a twist that pushes the effective rate even lower, and it is written into the statute. Under A.R.S. 5-1301, operators can deduct free bets and promotional credits from their taxable receipts, but the deduction shrinks on a schedule: a cap of 20% of receipts in 2022–2023, 15% in 2024, 10% in 2025–2026, and zero from 2027. So Arizona’s effective tax rises every year without the headline rate ever moving. That phase-down is already showing up. Even though the 10% rate did not change, the state’s 2025 sports-betting tax take jumped about 25.7% to roughly $53.7 million, partly because operators could deduct fewer free bets than the year before. Against 2025 gross revenue of about $838.7 million, that works out to an effective rate near 6.4%.

The rate itself was nearly raised. In her February 2026 budget, Governor Katie Hobbs proposed a tiered 45% tax on the largest online books (those handling roughly $75 million or more a month), projecting $150–175 million a year in new revenue. It did not survive. The final $18.3 billion bipartisan budget Hobbs signed on June 13, 2026 left the sports-betting tax untouched, so the rate stayed at 10% online and 8% retail.

Who you can bet with

Per the ADG’s official operator list, Arizona has 12 live mobile sportsbooks (14 licenses have been issued, and 2 are marked “ceased”). The live roster:

FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM, Caesars, bet365, Fanatics, Hard Rock Bet, BetRivers, theScore Bet, Bally Bet, Desert Diamond, and betcris.

FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM, and Caesars dominate, together controlling the large majority of the market. The rest fight for the remainder. Roughly 95% of all Arizona wagers are placed on phones rather than in person, one of the highest mobile shares in the country, and Arizonans bet about $9.13 billion in 2025, up nearly 15% on the year.

Watch the roster claims. Affiliate roundups are notorious for listing books that have already left. The ADG marks Golden Nugget and Sporttrade as ceased, yet plenty of “best Arizona apps” lists still show Golden Nugget as live. Sporttrade stopped taking Arizona bets on May 25, 2026 and pulled its app the following month, exiting to pivot into federally regulated prediction markets. The field churns constantly: bet365 arrived in early 2024, Fanatics absorbed the former PointsBet business around the same time, betcris launched in early 2025, and theScore Bet replaced ESPN BET on December 1, 2025. If a list names Betfred, WynnBET, Unibet, or Betway as an Arizona option, it is out of date.

Betting at the ballpark: Arizona’s retail books

Arizona did something few states have: it put sportsbooks inside the stadiums. Because pro teams hold the licenses, several run in-venue books. Caesars operates a large retail sportsbook at Chase Field, the Diamondbacks’ downtown Phoenix ballpark. BetMGM runs a sportsbook at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, home of the Cardinals, billed as the NFL’s first in-stadium book. Tribal casinos add more locations, including Desert Diamond and Gila River properties and a Hard Rock sportsbook at Twin Arrows near Flagstaff.

One caution for the affiliate-lag trap again: FanDuel converted its Footprint Center sportsbook into a lounge in mid-2025, so there is no in-person betting there anymore even though some listings still show it. In practice, retail is a rounding error here. With mobile at roughly 95% of wagers, the stadium books are more of a game-day amenity than a real slice of the market.

The college rule

Arizona lets you bet on its college teams, but not on the players.

✅ You can bet game lines on in-state college teams. Moneylines, point spreads, and totals on the Arizona State Sun Devils and Arizona Wildcats are all fair game. Arizona is not one of the states that bars betting on home schools.
❌ You cannot bet college player props, or in-game team props. A.R.S. 5-1315 prohibits wagers on “the performance or nonperformance of a team or individual participant” during a college event. That bans both individual player props and live in-game team props, and it applies to every college, not just Arizona schools.

What survives the ban are full-game outcome bets and season-long futures. You can bet the Sun Devils to cover, or take a futures market like the Heisman winner or a conference champion, because the statute carves out “the overall outcome of a collegiate sports event” and “seasonal awards based on a player’s cumulative overall play.” What you cannot do is bet a specific Wildcats player to score a touchdown or clear a points total. Arizona also bars betting on high school sports and on things like injuries and penalties.

Daily fantasy and what is restricted

Daily fantasy sports is legal in Arizona, authorized by the same 2021 law that legalized betting, regulated by the ADG, and limited to players 21 and up. The big platforms operate here, but with a rule change worth knowing: in November 2023, the ADG determined that against-the-house “pick’em” contests (where you play the operator for a fixed payout) function as sports betting and are not allowed. PrizePicks and Underdog kept their Arizona licenses by switching to peer-to-peer contests where you compete against other players.

That line has since collided with prediction markets. In December 2025, the ADG issued a notice of intent to revoke Underdog’s Arizona fantasy license, citing its role as a technology partner for Crypto.com’s federally regulated sports-event contracts. Offshore books (Bovada and similar) remain illegal and unregulated in Arizona: with a dozen licensed apps, there is no reason to risk one.

Prediction markets: Arizona vs Kalshi

Arizona is the sharpest enforcement story in the country, and it is easy to get the mechanism wrong, so here is the sequence.

Two different Arizona actors moved against Kalshi. First the regulator: the Arizona Department of Gaming sent Kalshi a cease-and-desist letter on May 21, 2025, calling it unlicensed gambling. Then the prosecutor: Attorney General Kris Mayes filed a 20-count criminal information on March 17, 2026 (four election-wagering counts tied to Kalshi contracts on races like the 2026 Arizona governor’s race, plus 16 illegal-betting counts). It was the first criminal prosecution of a prediction market in the United States.

Then the courts flipped the script. Kalshi sued Arizona, and Judge Michael T. Liburdi first denied Kalshi’s own request for an injunction. But the CFTC and the U.S. Department of Justice filed their own suit against Arizona on April 2, 2026, and on May 5, 2026 Judge Liburdi granted a preliminary injunction, on the federal government’s motion, barring Arizona from prosecuting Kalshi. Federal commodities law, he reasoned, likely preempts state gambling law here. Note the word preliminary: this is not a permanent ruling, and Arizona is appealing.

That appeal lands in the Ninth Circuit, and this is where Arizona fits the national map. As of mid-July 2026 the Ninth Circuit had not ruled. The picture is usually described as a circuit split, and that is not accurate yet. Only the Third Circuit has ruled on whether federal commodities law overrides state gambling law, siding with Kalshi in the New Jersey case in April 2026, and only at the preliminary-injunction stage. The Sixth Circuit, which covers Ohio, has so far only refused Kalshi emergency relief; it heard argument in the consolidated Ohio and Tennessee appeals on July 30, 2026 and has not ruled. Arizona, like California, sits in the Ninth Circuit, which heard Nevada’s case in April 2026 without ruling. A Ninth Circuit decision against Kalshi would help create the real split that does not exist yet, and push the whole question toward the Supreme Court. Separately, Governor Hobbs signed an executive order on July 9, 2026 barring state executive-branch employees from trading prediction markets on nonpublic government information. For a bettor, the practical reality is that Kalshi still functions in Arizona today, but its status here is contested, not settled.

The honest 2026 outlook

Arizona’s market is mature, deep, and one of the ten largest in the country by handle. The open questions are legal and political, not existential:

The Kalshi appeal is the single biggest thing to watch, and it may not stop there. It goes to the Ninth Circuit, which has already heard and not yet decided Kalshi’s appeal of its Nevada loss, a separate and further-along case that will likely signal how Arizona’s lands.
The roster is in flux. After Sporttrade’s exit, the ADG reopened its license window from June 26 to July 10, 2026 for up to six new operators, including an open tribal slot. Arizona has lost several books over four years even as it courts new ones, so expect the app list to keep shifting.
The tax stays a target. Hobbs’ 45% push failed in 2026, but the promo-deduction phase-down means the effective rate climbs into 2027 regardless.

For someone betting today, none of that changes the basics: legal, 21-and-up, mobile-first, inside state lines, with the college-prop ban as the one rule most people trip over. For how Arizona stacks up against the rest of the country, see the state-by-state hub.

FAQ

Is FanDuel legal in Arizona? Yes. FanDuel is one of Arizona’s 12 licensed apps and was the first sportsbook to launch in the state, back on September 9, 2021.

What is the legal betting age in Arizona? 21, for both online and in-person betting. There is no 18+ option.

Can I bet on ASU or the Arizona Wildcats? Yes, on team markets: moneyline, spread, total, and futures. You cannot bet player props on individual college athletes, which are banned statewide.

How many betting apps does Arizona have? Twelve live mobile sportsbooks per the state regulator, led by FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM, and Caesars. Lists showing 14 or more are usually counting ceased or exited brands.

Is Kalshi legal in Arizona? It is contested. Arizona criminally charged Kalshi in March 2026, but a federal judge blocked that prosecution in May 2026 while the case is appealed. Kalshi still operates, but treat prediction markets as unsettled here.

Do I have to live in Arizona to bet? No. You only need to be physically inside the state and 21+. Geolocation checks your location on every wager, so a visitor can bet the same as a resident, and an Arizonan cannot bet from across the state line.